As the new year dawns, and the frenetic holiday season recedes, it's a good time to take stock of how well you're doing in search. There's no better time than the post-holiday lull to do some hard thinking, and some thoughtful planning, about how you might improve your organization's search visibility in 2008 by using best practices -- both in terms of SEO and paid search.

What better way to end a prosperous year for search than with a little controversy? A recent Search Insider column by Gord Hotchkiss declaring that media agencies don't "get" search struck a cord with search specialists and marketers alike, creating an interesting divide between SEMs with larger advertisers in the space who are benefiting from smart, integrated campaigns and those who are unable to tap that market.

OK, I admit it. I'm a sucker for the movie "It's a Wonderful Life." I'm happy to say that I've once again had my annual fix of George Bailey. So that, together with the fact that I can count the days left in 2007 on one hand, caused me to get reflective. There's something about the turning of a calendar page that causes one to clean up our inventory of lessons learned from the past year, and start goal-setting for the new. That's why the new year brings the inevitable "Best of" and "Top 10" lists, the 2007 Time Lines ...

It's quite fitting that my first column following the winter Search Insider Summit is also my last column of 2007. As loyal readers know, I always use my post-SIS column to recap the top buzzwords dropped at the summit. Now I have a chance to put the buzz in the context of a year-end review and new-year preview. To that end, I've added an element of trending (ala Google Zeitgeist) to my buzzword bingo -- reporting on not only the most popular buzzwords but also the biggest gainers over past summits.

Search engine optimization is sometimes characterized as a practice that panders to an algorithm. In reality, an increasing number of potential customers and readers are using search engines to find content. It's a misnomer to say that SEO is about writing for search engines. Content generation is really about writing for your customers.

It's getting late in the year, and I realized yesterday morning that this is my last column for 2007 (my next round in the Search Insider rotation will be on Jan. 2.). I produced 25 columns and about 20,000 words for Search Insider this year, so for this wrap-up I'm going to focus on a few select columns that you may still find useful, interesting, or entertaining. Happy holidays to all.

By far the funniest thing I read all week was the opening paragraph to Rob Hof's article at BusinessWeek.com about Google's Knol: "Funny how people always want to declare whatever Google announces as a [insert name here]-killer. Google's new tool called 'knol,' which will give people a way to write 'authoritative' articles about a particular subject, is supposed to kill Wikipedia." Rob, please accept my apology now. I found this funny because of the sheer quantity of those who are trying to achieve the opposite title: namely, that of "Google-killer."

The issue of privacy has long been the online industry's proverbial "elephant in the room," the big looming animal that everybody knows is there but that no one is willing to acknowledge. There are several reasons why this is so: first, that users have, for the most part, been slow to appreciate how much we marketers are now able to know about them, plus the fact that the number of spectacular privacy breaches have fortunately been few. But there's a third reason that privacy isn't taken seriously in this industry: Nobody's figured out how to build a business around it. ...